The News
Donald Trump became the first ever former U.S. president to stand trial on criminal charges as his hush money case opened in Manhattan on Monday.
Trump has been charged with 34 felony counts in a case that revolves around a payment of $130,000 that his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, made to the porn actor Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged sexual encounter. Prosecutors say Trump repaid Cohen with checks “disguised as a payment for legal services,” leading to charges that the former president falsified business records to conceal damaging information.
If convicted, Trump could face up to four years in prison.
“This is an assault on America,” Trump told reporters before entering the courtroom. “This is political persecution.”
Jury selection is expected to take one to two weeks, as 12 jurors and six alternatives who can be fair and impartial about Trump are selected out of the hundreds of New Yorkers reporting for jury duty.
Trump will be required to be in court four days a week for the trial that expected to last six to eight weeks, limiting his ability to campaign as the presumptive Republican presidential nominee. While one Trump adviser has called it a “scheduling nightmare,” Trump plans to ramp up his television appearances and make the most of his social media reach, Politico reported.
SIGNALS
DA frames case as election interference
While this is commonly referred to as Trump’s “hush money” case, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has said it’s really about election interference. Bragg alleged that the payment to Daniels was “part of a wider scheme enacted by Trump and his allies from 2015 to 2017 to keep damaging information from voters,” CNN reported.
A key piece of that argument will be establishing Trump’s “willingness to circumvent normal rules and laws about how elections are done, in order to win,” a former federal prosecutor told Al Jazeera, calling this trial “a preview of his whole attitude towards the elections.”
Trump attempts to delegitimize case as hedge against verdict
In a Truth Social post early Monday morning, Trump accused Democrats of “already cheating on the 2024 Presidential Election by bringing, or helping to bring, all of these bogus lawsuits against me,” saying the suits forced him to sit in court and spend money that could be used for campaigning on legal fees. “Election Interference!,” he wrote.
Trump is trying to delegitimize the case “partly to hedge against any future guilty verdict,” CNN’s Stephen Collinson wrote. While the former president’s arguments have proven “convincing to many Republican voters who embraced his narrative of persecution,” Collinson said, it’s not yet clear how it’ll play with undecided general election voters.
Trial is least serious of Trump’s criminal cases, but timing is important
The hush-money trial is “generally considered to be the least serious of the four [criminal] cases” against Trump, The Hill reported, but its timing could prove consequential: This might be the only trial that goes before a jury before election day.
The former president unsuccessfully sought to delay the trial until after the election. Unlike in the federal cases against him, Trump would not be able to pardon himself if he’s convicted on state charges, making the timeline of the New York hush money case even more important to his campaign. While polling on whether voters would still support Trump if he’s convicted isn’t totally clear, even a small dip in support could have major consequences in what’s expected to be a nail-biter of an election.